Scottish Sea Fisheries Statistics 2023 - corrected March 2025
An Accredited Official Statistics publication that provides detailed information on the tonnage and value of landings, fishing vessel characteristics and employment. This publication and associated supplementary tables in the supporting documents were amended in March 2025 to correct the value of landings by Scottish vessels.
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In March 2025, corrections were made to all tables which include landings by Scottish vessels. The value of landings by Scottish vessels in the last five years have been corrected to impute landed values for Scottish vessels with missing sales information. The average price of landings into Scotland by species and year was used to impute these missing values. The tonnage landed by Scottish vessels was unchanged.
The total value landed by Scottish vessels anywhere (Table 8) in 2022 and 2023 increased by five per cent (between the original December publication numbers and the corrected March numbers). The overall increase in the total value landed by Scottish vessels anywhere pre 2022 was lower, at around two to three per cent. Total demersal and shellfish landings by Scottish vessels anywhere in 2023 increased by nine per cent. However, the value of pelagic species increased by less than 0.5 per cent.
Landings by Scottish vessels abroad (Table 7 and Table 28) were impacted the most by this correction. The value of landings abroad in 2023 increased by seven per cent between the original and corrected publication numbers. The impact on the value of individual species varied considerably, however demersal and shellfish species that are frequently landed abroad have the largest changes. The value of Plaice landed by Scottish vessels abroad in 2023, increased by £2.5 million following the correction.
In addition, a minor correction was made to table 31 to fix a coding error. This resulted in small changes to tonnages in some ICES areas.
All tables presented here and in previous publications are available for download from the Scottish Sea Fisheries Statistics publications section of the Scottish Government website [10].
Spatial information on fish and shellfish caught by Scottish vessels is available on Marine Scotland interactive maps and Marine Scotland Data Publications. Links to map layers and data are available from the fishing activity data and statistics page. This also includes experimental gridded data from Scottish under-12 metre vessels based on daily latitude and longitude positions provided by fishers.
Additional landings which were previously excluded, due to missing or incorrect information on the source database, have been included in this publication. On 8 October 2024, the Marine Management Organisation (MMO) published unscheduled corrections to the UK Sea Fisheries Statistics from 2018 to 2022. The corrections made by MMO, to the rest of the UK data, have been included in this publication. Landings into Scotland and landings by Scottish vessels were unaffected by this correction as we had already incorporated manual corrections.
More information about the data and methodology used to produce the Scottish sea fisheries statistics publication is provided in a stand-alone technical manual. This also includes a glossary of terms. The technical manual can be found here: Scottish sea fisheries statistics: technical manual - gov.scot (www.gov.scot)
[10] Scottish Sea Fisheries Statistics Publications: Sea fisheries statistics - gov.scot (www.gov.scot)